Japanese authorities and the IOC kept insisting, long after everyone else stopped believing them, that all was going to plan
is making some of its most important coverage of the covid-19 pandemic freely available to readers of“THE PREPARATIONS for the games are, as we have repeatedly stated, making rapid progress,” promised an official from the Japanese Olympic Committee, even as the crisis deepened. Despite mounting doubts from athletes and sporting federations, the president of the International Olympic Committee would not contemplate a delay: “The Tokyo games will and must go on.
On March 24th Japan and the IOC bowed to the inevitable. Abe Shinzo, Japan’s prime minister, told reporters that he and Thomas Bach, the IOC’s president, were in “100% agreement” about postponing the games. A joint statement from the IOC and the Tokyo organising committee said they would be rescheduled to next year, but not later than the summer, in order “to safeguard the health of the athletes, everybody involved in the Olympic games and the international community”.
For Mr Abe, postponement of the games is a personal embarrassment, in light of his long refusal to countenance a delay to what has become a legacy project for him. The games were intended to mark the country’s definitive recovery not just from the devastation of the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster of 2011, but more broadly from the gloom of the country’s post-1980s inertia. Postponement, however, also represents a partial victory for Mr Abe. The alternative, after all, was cancellation.
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